Hunter O’Hanian, CAA executive director, recently spoke to the artist Holly Hughes about proposed budget cuts for the National Endowment for the Arts. Hughes is known for being one of the NEA Four—artists whose work was described by Republican lawmakers as controversial and even pornographic. The debacle over the NEA Four led to the closing of the federal agency’s program of giving grants to individual artists.

O’Hanian and Hughes discuss ten points that originated with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that advised Trump on his recent federal budget proposal. The two take on each suggestion point by point, offering a rebuttal to the Heritage Foundation’s logic.

Though we know the most recent budget does fund the NEA and NEH through the fall of 2017 with a small increase in funding—and we are thrilled about that—we do not believe we are in the clear. When funding is allocated again in the fall this conversation should serve as a reminder to why the arts and humanities are so important to our world.

Today the US President released his proposal for 2018 federal budget – it envisions transferring additional billions of dollars to the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security from many important domestic programs such as the Environmental Protection Agency, education, and legal services. As expected, the budget also calls for the complete elimination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and 16 other federal agencies. CAA was one of the first national organizations to speak against these cuts.

As educators, art historians, artists, curators, museum directors, designers, scholars, and other members of the visual arts community we must act to defend the role of arts and humanities in our society. The budget process is long and ultimately controlled by the US House and Senate. Earlier this week, CAA traveled to Washington for Humanities Advocacy Day to meet with many congressional offices to discuss the importance of continued NEA and NEH funding. We will return again next week to do the same for Arts Advocacy Day.

In addition, CAA assembled an Arts and Humanities Advocacy Toolkit with information on how to contact your representatives in Congress to voice your support for the NEA and NEH and the many quality programs they fund. Call their offices. Email them. Attend Town Halls. You can learn how these agencies support activities in your area here: funded by the NEA and funded by the NEH. Be sure to let your representatives know of the impact of the arts and humanities in your districts. Spread the word to your colleagues and friends.

Despite the White House’s opposition to continued funding for the NEA and NEH, there is sufficient reason to believe that many members of the US House and Senate will support a budget that includes continued funding for these agencies. I ask our members to join in the effort to make sure all members of Congress knows the importance of the work done by these agencies.

For more than a century, the College Art Association (CAA) has represented art historians, artists, museum professionals, designers, and others who think and care about the visual arts and its impact on our culture. We do this in part through direct advocacy for artistic and academic freedom.

Like many other Americans, we have closely watched the proposed changes to the federal government. Recent news reports reveal that the US President intends to propose the elimination of funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This proposal is reportedly based in part on a recommendation by the Heritage Foundation that states, “As the U.S. Congress struggles to balance the federal budget and end the decades-long spiral of deficit spending, few programs seem more worthy of outright elimination than the National Endowment for the Arts.”

We offer our complete and total opposition to these efforts.

Since the 1960s, the NEA and NEH have supported artists, writers, museum professionals, and a wide array of scholars of various disciplines in creating new work and scholarship. The NEA supports thousands of cultural and educational organizations, and, in a few cases, individual artists. The NEH, which strengthens teaching and learning in schools and colleges—as well as the work of independent scholars—creates access to educational scholarship and research nationwide. In addition, the NEH is a strong supporter of museum exhibitions throughout the country. Combined, the budgets for the two agencies are less than $300 million. The organizational grantees generate hundreds of millions of dollars in matching support and countless new works of art and scholarship. These works and related projects are studied and enjoyed by millions of Americans in museums and other venues. The cultural sector of the US economy generates more the $135 billion in revenue and employs over three million people in small towns and large cities countrywide.

Given that the respective budgets of the NEA and NEH represent only a tiny fraction of the entire federal budget, their planned elimination cannot logically be seen as a cost-saving measure. Rather, it appears to be a deliberate, ominous effort to silence artistic and academic voices, representing a potentially chilling next step in an apparent effort to stifle and eradicate oppositional voices and cultural output from civic life. By eliminating the support for these agencies, the government undermines the unifying potential of the arts, culture, and education that encourages and nurtures communication and positive discussion.

CAA leadership is monitoring the possible elimination and/or reduction of funding for the NEA and NEH and how it may affect our members and the work they do. CAA will communicate and collaborate with other cultural and educational organizations and learned societies to determine potential future advocacy options.

We urge our fellow CAA members to contact their representatives in Congress to let them know the importance of maintaining a robust, national, publicly supported framework for artistic and academic freedom. When you contact your representative, we ask that you let them know you are a member of CAA and together we are advocating for continued public funding for the arts. We also encourage you to contact the National Humanities Alliance and Americans for the Arts to become further involved.

Through our collective strength, we can ensure that public funding of scholarship and art making continues, free from political and commercial interference.

CAA is excited to present talks by the following special guests at the 105th Annual Conference, taking place February 15–18, 2017, in New York.

Keynote Speaker

This year Mary Miller, a scholar of art of the ancient New World, Sterling Professor of History of Art, and senior director of the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale University, will deliver the keynote address during Convocation.

This special event, to be held on the first evening of the Annual Conference, includes a welcome from Suzanne Preston Blier, CAA president, and Hunter O’Hanian, CAA executive director, as well as the presentation of annual Awards for Distinction.

Convocation is free and open to the public.

Distinguished Artist Interviews

Organized by CAA’s Services to Artists Committee, the Distinguished Artist Interviews feature esteemed artists who discuss their work with a respected colleague. The interviews are held as part of ARTspace, a program partially funded by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In addition to remarks from Silverman, the panel will feature talks from Richard Meyer, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University, and Homay King, Professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College.

Please join the speakers for a reception immediately following the session in the Third Floor East Promenade. A cash bar will be available.

Conference registration is required to attend the Distinguished Scholar Session.

This Valentine’s Day, the College Art Association (CAA) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) are showing their love for artists by partnering to offer professional development programming, “The Artist as Entrepreneur,” the day before the CAA Annual Conference. This day-long event has been customized to fit the needs of CAA artist members but is open to all artists. It allows participants the opportunity to attend part of the CAA Annual Conference with a ticket to a session of their choice. Participants are also welcome to join numerous conference events that are open to the public.

NYFA’s “The Artist as Entrepreneur” is a course that teaches the fundamental principles of sustainability—and ultimately profitability—in the arts. This includes topics such as strategic planning, finance, and marketing. Additional material is drawn from NYFA’s popular textbook which accompanies this curriculum, The Profitable Artist (Allworth Press, 2011). The structure is a blend of formal lectures, breakout groups, and one-on-one meetings. Participants work through a flexible and dynamic “action plan,” which provides a blueprint for their practice or specific projects. Each receives specific feedback from experts in the field as well as their peers in the course.

Craft Action: Genre Bending

Craft Action: Genre Bending is a juried video screening exploring the role of process, skill, and action as it relates to craft mediums. The growing interdisciplinarity of craft practices is the impetus for this call for submissions of video work by practitioners engaged craft media, such as ceramics, textiles, metals, wood, and glass. The use of video with craft enables the artist to engage in using materials and tools in combination with their representation to express new ideas, addressing making by investigating not only what is shown, but how it is shown.

Media Lounge is CAA’s main stage of new media explorations where students, academics, and artists come together to build camaraderie. These methods of working with conceptual and technical content provides fodder for a dynamic dialogue of how artists’ place themselves in the larger distinction of media, both analog and digital.

Each year Media Lounge coordinates a central theme to explore the interrelationship of media across a topic. This year in NYC, Media Lounge presents screenings, panels and discussions that explore the genres of craft and video, politics and strategy, and inter-related material explorations of new media and footage that entangles what is expected of cross-disciplinary explosions of content, surrounding the theme of Genre Bending.

Genre is a way to group practices into categories that are familiar-or frame an expected experience from the audience. Media Lounge NYC 2017 uses genre and the elasticity of bending to explore new media genre relationships and their impulse of hybrid crossovers.

Anne Sophie-Lehman has theorized that the combination of craft and film produces its own unique genre, which she calls “showing making”. Part archival, part instructional, part visual pleasure, and part showmanship, this idea of genre bending and genre production is the starting point for this year’s Media Lab theme.

Craft Action: Genre Bending seeks to explore how artists bend, break, subvert, or invent new genres for craft and film. Artists will be asked to note in their application what genre/s they see themselves as bending or creating. This may be a traditional genre, like comedy, tragedy, animation, or a craft-based genre like the instructional demonstration – or a genre yet-to-be defined that can provoke new understanding and considerations.

Artwork Requirements

All video submission must be original works of art completed within the last 3 years.

Submission Guidelines

Artists are required to submit video as Vimeo files, opening up the access of the files to shared

The video(s) should be an excerpt totaling no longer than 5 minutes.

Artists may submit up to three videos to be selected

Screening Dates and Panel Discussion

CAA Conference Media Lounge
February 16, 2017
Thursday 1:30-3

Guest Curators and Conference Panelists

Marilyn Zapf is the Assistant Director at The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design (CCCD) and Curator of CCCD’s Benchspace Gallery & Workshop in Asheville, NC where she has curated a number of nationally-traveling exhibitions including Made in WNC (2015) and Gee’s Bend: From Quilts to Prints (2014). Zapf teaches courses on the History of Craft at Warren Wilson College and publishes articles and reviews in international publications, including Art Jewelry Form and Crafts Magazine (UK). She is a founding member of the international experimental history of design collective, Fig. 9, holds a MA in the History of Design from the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, and a BA (English Literature) and BFA (Jewelry and Metalworking) from The University of Georgia. Her areas of research include craft, postmodernism and de/industrialization.

Namita Gupta Wiggers is a curator, writer, educator and artist based in Portland, Oregon. She is the Director of Critical Craft Forum, and Exhibitions Review Editor, Journal of Modern Craft. From 2004-12 Wiggers served as the Curator, and later Director and Chief Curator (2012 -14) of Museum of Contemporary Craft. She curated over 65 exhibitions, including: New Embroidery: Not Your Grandma’s Doily, Touching Warms the Art, The Academy is Full of Craft, Object Focus: The Bowl, and Manufractured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects (curated by Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov), and Gestures of Resistance (curated by Judith Leemann and Shannon Stratton.). She curated the first museum exhibitions on Betty Feves, Laurie Herrick, Nikki McClure, Emily Pilloton, and Ken Shores. Recent exhibitions include Across the Table, Across the Land with Michael Strand for NCECA’s 50th Anniversary, and Everything has been Material for Scissors to Shape, on view at the Wing Luke Museum of Asian American Experience. Wiggers is editing a Companion on Contemporary Craft (Wiley Blackwell), and collaborating on a project focused on gender and jewelry with Benjamin Lignel.

Entry Fee

Free

Venue

Hilton New York Midtown, College Art Association Conference, Media lounge

ArtSpace + Media Lounge

CAA’s Services to Artists Committee hosts offerings in ArtSpace and Media Lounge, a “conference within a conference” of innovative programs that are of special interest to artists, emerging professionals, and artist / educators. ArtSpace and Media Lounge programming offers an informal, dynamic setting with sessions, panels, screenings, curated media, distinguished artists interviews, exhibition opportunities and other social events. These programs are free and open to the public, and do not require CAA membership or registration fees for the conference to participate or attend.

Thank you in advance for your participation and please feel free to contact carissacarman at gmail.com if you have questions regarding the submission.

This fall, CAA will visit local New York colleges and universities and host a number of wine and cheese receptions throughout the country, connecting professionals in the visual arts within their communities. Taking place at many art institutions in major U.S. cities, these meet-and-greets are a great opportunity to join arts scholars and art makers in your area. Whether you are an existing or former CAA member, work in some capacity in the arts, or are just curious about what we do, we hope you will be able to join us.

CAA’s new executive director, Hunter O’Hanian, will attend many of the receptions and will discuss his ideas and vision for the future of CAA. Come meet new CAA members and reconnect with fellow members.

The artist Young Suk Lee participates in ARTexchange at the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC (photograph by Bradley Marks)

The Services to Artists Committee invites artist members to participate in ARTexchange, CAA’s unique pop-up exhibition and annual meet-up for artists and curators. This social event provides an opportunity for artists to share their work and build affinities with other artists, historians, curators, and cultural producers. ARTexchange will take place at the 105th Annual Conference in New York on Friday evening, February 17, 2017, from 5:30 to 7:30 PM.

Each artist is given the space on, above, and beneath a six-foot table to exhibit their work: prints, paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, and small installations; performance, process-based, interactive, and participatory works are especially encouraged. Previous ARTexchange participants have found that this parameter sparked many creative display options. Please note that artwork cannot be hung on walls, and it is not possible to run power cords from laptops or other electronic devices to outlets.

To participate as an exhibiting artist in 2017, contact Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs, by December 2, 2016, with the following information: (1) a short description of what you will exhibit and how you will use the six-foot table space (provide details regarding performance, sound, spoken word, or technology-based work, including laptop presentations); (2) your CAA member number (memberships must be active through February 18, 2017); and (3) your website or a link to a digital portfolio.

Because ARTexchange is a popular venue and participation is based on available space, early applicants are given preference. Participants are responsible for their work; CAA is not liable for losses or damages. Sales of work are not permitted. Deadline extended: January 6, 2017.

CAA invites submissions for artists to create projects for Art Journal Open, an open-access, independently edited website that provides an agile counterpart to the quarterly Art Journal. Art Journal Open takes advantage of the unique qualities of the web to present artists’ projects, scholarly essays, conversations and interviews, notes from the field, artifacts of materials and process, and news items. The site embraces the evolving nature of multimedia formats and techniques, seeking to serve as a provisional, suggestive, and projective archive for contemporary art. Contributors include artists, scholars, critics, curators, researchers, archivists, librarians, and other cultural producers who generate primary-source material of contemporary art and the interpretative network that coalesces into the historical record. Operating on an open platform, the website is committed to fostering new intellectual exchanges. Gloria Sutton of Northeastern University serves as web editor for Art Journal Open, which publishes content on a rolling basis.